PHILOSOPHY OF FLORICULTURE. 
173 
immediate energy of vegetable life by which that effect is pro¬ 
duced. We can fatten plants for our tables as well as animals ; 
and we can vary their forms and increase the beauty of their 
flowers, and also vary and prolong their times of flowering for the 
ornamenting our parterres and conservatories ; but, still, we are 
merely trainers of the plants ; and when their power of vegetable 
action ceases we can do nothing. 
It is this action which constitutes vegetable life ; and we are not 
aware of any one inorganic substance which is better fitted than 
another for furnishing the substance of a plant, taking the whole 
range of the vegetable kingdom. We find them in all situations, 
from fathoms deep in the ocean to the naked rock and the burn¬ 
ing sand, on the last of which, water-melons, among others, grow 
most splendidly to an immense size, and are exceedingly cooling to 
the sojourners in the wilderness. But, in all these cases, and in 
every case that can be imagined, there is nothing but the plant 
and the rest of nature around it. It is admirably fitted to its 
situation, no doubt; but, still, there is nothing save the plant 
itself and the circumstances of its situation. 
Now, the life of a plant is not material, not even the rarest 
vapour that ever was produced ; and of its action in the individual, 
from the time that the germ is visible to the microscope, to its 
final death, we know neither the beginning nor the end. We see 
its working, or rather the result of its working, and if we cultivate 
the plant we can make it work differently,—but the life, the energy 
which works is perfectly inscrutable. 
Our common notions of the working of men always mislead 
us when we come to treat of the workings of nature ; because in 
such cases we see both the workmen and the materials ; whereas, 
in the case of a plant, we see neither the one nor the other. 
There is this further difference, that a man cannot elaborate the 
materials with which he works—cannot for instance make a single 
grain more of earth in a garden by merely digging at it; but the 
vegetables which he plants in it, increase their quantity of matter 
according to their kind, and the circumstances in which they are 
placed. 
The confounding of these is the real cause of all the misappre¬ 
hension and want of meaning which are to be found in th e fancied 
theories of botanical writers : they will have a third somethino*. • 
and as this something does not exist as a substance, it is utterly 
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